AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ICARE — “KHAOS”

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Oct 272020
 

 

Khaos is the new album by the Swiss band Icare. It’s set for release on October 30th by Division Records. It sounds like a musical diary, a recording of a band’s progress from a starting point four years ago to the extravagant destination they’ve now reached. Which is not to say their starting point was in any way mundane — far from it. It was as breathtaking as the place where time took them, albeit in a different way.

It turns out that the idea of a journey that comes to mind in listening to the album isn’t too far from the truth. When Icare joined together in 2016, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, their vision was to create an extremely virulent form of grindcore, which incorporated elements of black and death metal. They recorded an album in that year named Khaos. But things began to change. Those changes were manifested in a 2018 album named Charogne, which the band performed live as a single 45-minute song.

This year they returned to those early steps in Khaos, and transformed the album in the studio, among other things giving the music a greater connection to black metal. But it would be wrong to sum up the album as solely “blackened grindcore” — it goes to many other places as well, which you can discover for yourselves through our premiere of a full album stream today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COFFIN APARTMENT — “TRANSIENT EXUBERANCE”

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Oct 232020
 

 

In Hong Kong, where a population of roughly 8 million people are packed into a confined area in which little developable land remains, landlords have resorted to illegally subdividing space into tiny cubicles for rent in which all living activities must take place within areas as small as 15 square feet. Known as “coffin apartments”, these nightmarishly claustrophobic holes have been condemned by the United Nations as “an insult to human dignity”.

Coffin Apartment is also the name chosen by a Portland trio whose unsettling music is the subject of this premiere — though in the age of the coronavirus the name has different and perhaps even more relevant connotations.

Trying to succinctly describe the audio assaults of Coffin Apartment is not an easy task. In a freewheeling way they’ve thrown elements of death metal, grind, hardcore punk, sludgy noise rock, and even prog and psychedelia into a blender. The results are heavy as hell, rabidly raging, and mentally destabilizing. Calling the music “off kilter” would be an understatement. But the results are also so surprising and so electrifying as to become unexpectedly transfixing. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: KATAPULT — “LOAD THE KATAPULT”

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Oct 232020
 


Photo by Florian Moritz and Rikard Östberg

 

We’re about to premiere a red-hot song and video from the new EP by Katapult. It’s so damned tempting to just quote the title of the EP — Shut the Fuck Up and Press Play — and get out of the way. But we have to have our own fun too, even if it probably pales in comparison to the amount of fun it looks like the Katapult crew are having in this video. So, on we go….

You can see the name of this first single from the EP up above, but there’s a sub-title: The complete name is “Load the Katapult (your old band is shit)“. They’re probably not talking about your old band in particular, so settle down. Though, actually, settling down is not what any red-blooded listener will do when they hear this track and watch these Swiss and Swedish thrashers stomp on the gas pedal. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MONGREL’S CROSS — “WHAT THE CARDS MAY TELL”

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Oct 222020
 

 

Two years ago we had the pleasure of premiering a full stream of Psalter of the Royal Dragon Court, the second album by the Australian extreme metal duo Mongrel’s Cross. As we wrote of the album in an accompanying review: “It’s ravaging and regal, sinister and searing, warlike and overflowing with a kind of mythic grandeur. It’s the sound of saga, with an aura of larger-than-life fantasy surrounding all of its movements. And it’s almost relentlessly explosive, blazing like a comet in the heavens, or like the fireballs erupting from that clash of titans on the cover.”

We might have gotten carried away with words (as we admitted at the time), but the album had such high-flying splendor (and feral savagery) in its amalgam of black thrash and epic heavy metal that it was hard to stay calm. And thus it was exciting news to discovery that Mongrel’s Cross would be returning this year with their third album, Arcana, Scrying and Revelation. Like the first two, it will be released by Hells Headbangers Records, and we again have the chance to spread the word with another Mongrel’s Cross premiere, in advance of the record’s November 27 release. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SYNASTRY — “DEAD TO ME”

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Oct 222020
 

 

Montreal’s Synastry first came together in the early 2000s, at a time when MySpace dominated social networking and the metal scene was in many ways very different from what it is today. The band released their first EP, Pallets of My New World, in 2006 and followed that with a debut album named Blind Eyes Bleed in 2008. But in 2012 the band went dormant, and only this year have revived.

In making their comeback, Synastry have recorded a new EP named Civilization’s Coma, with plans to move forward with work on a new album. The EP is a three-track affair set for release on November 27th, and today we’re premiering, through a lyric video, a single from the EP entitled “Dead To Me“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): KEVEL — “MUTATIS MUTANDIS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Oct 212020
 

 

In the first minutes of the opening song “Of Being“, the Athenian band Kevel lay before the listener a blueprint of what will become the foundation for the imposing and wondrous edifice of their new album Mutatis Mutandis, which we’re premiering today. In that opening, a riveting drum solo is joined by heavy groaning chords and shrill discordant arpeggios. In one fell swoop, the music hybridizes primal physical punch, dismal and depressive moods, and spine-tingling sensations of flaring madness.

The band’s ability to create teeth-on-edge tension and earth-quaking heaviness comes to the fore again and again over these 50 minutes. The nuanced yet persistently skull-cracking drum performance repeatedly threatens to steal the show, both amplifying the songs’ most intense moments and creating fascinating contrasts within all of the band’s other richly multi-faceted movements. The bass tone possesses the heft of granite but the nimbleness of larks. And the guitarists are highly adept at creating tension and turmoil.

But it turns out that all these riveting contributions really are just the foundation, and what Kevel have created around it is a gnarled, frightening, yet shining tower that reaches into the stars, almost as astonishing and awe-inspiring in its visions as it is shattering in its impact. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FEED THEM DEATH — “THE UNATTAINABLE JOY” (AND A REVIEW OF “FOR OUR CULPABLE DEAD”)

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Oct 212020
 

 

Those of you who are already familiar with the music of Feed Them Death will have a good idea of the sheer madness that will invade your mind when you listen to FTD’s new EP, For Our Culpable Dead, which is set for release by Brucia Records on November 2nd. Newcomers, however, should prepare for sonic shock and awe, the kind of ingenious yet unsettling experience that amalgamates bone-smashing violence, mind-boggling delirium, more twists and turns than an out-of-control roller-coaster ride, and an extreme disregard for mental or emotional comfort zones.

Feed Them Death‘s avant-garde formulations of death/grind have been boldly revealed through a 2017 EP that was then expanded into the debut album No Solution / Dissolution, released in 2018 by GrimmDistribution and Exalted Woe Records, and a second album released earlier this year by I, Voidhanger Records, Panopticism: Belong / Be Lost. Apparently ever restless, FTD’s soul creator Void could not let this year expire without one more brazen explosion of mind-mutilating inventiveness, and we present a further excerpt from the new EP today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HORNCROWNED — “DIE JUDICII (APPALLING ABOMINATION)”

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Oct 202020
 

 

As of today, two songs from the new album by Horncrowned are out in the world, doing their best to burn it to cinders. The one that was released first is the title track to that album, Rex Exterminii (The Hand of the Opposer), and the second is the track we’re now premiering — “Die Judicii (Appalling Abomination)“.

Rex Exterminii (The Hand of the Opposer) is this Colombian black metal band’s fifth album in a near-20-year career. It will be released by Ketzer Records on November 20th. It will leave you shell-shocked, blistered, and breathless. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HELL:ON — “MY TESTAMENT”

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Oct 202020
 

 

Three weeks ago we premiered a song named “The Architect’s Temple” from a forthcoming album by the Ukrainian death metal band Hell:On. That album, Scythian Stamm, is Hell:On‘s sixth full-length in a career that began in 2005, and it’s set for release on November 1st. Today we have the pleasure of premiering another song from the album, which is presented through a video that includes the lyrics.

Those lyrics are taken from an English-language translation of a poem named “Заповіт” (Zapovit), which translates to “Testament”. The poem was first published in 1845 and written by Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, and political figure, as well as folklorist and ethnographer. According to this article, “His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language.” The article also reports that he was convicted in 1847 for promoting the independence of Ukraine from Russia and for ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. The translation of “Заповіт” used in the video was made by John Weir. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PSYCHOSOMATIC — “PERSONALITY AGENDA”

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Oct 192020
 


Photo by Michael Alvarez

 

Psychosomatic have been slugging and slashing their way across the heavy metal landscape for more than 30 years, and with their seventh album released in late August of this year by Nefarious Industries they savagely banished any worry that all the years and miles might be slowing them down. With the feral energy of teenagers but the songwriting and performance skills of a band who’ve played over a thousand shows in North America, they put together a ripper of an album under the title of The Invisible Prison.

All the shows and all the recordings have honed the blades of Psychosomatic to an even sharper gleam, but the passing decades haven’t mellowed them in the slightest. And why would they? There are just as many reasons to be pissed-off now as there were in 1988 when these Sacramento thrashers first came together, and probably more. The rage and disgust certainly burn through in the full-tilt riot of “Personality Agenda“, the song that’s the subject of the video we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

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